Promise Ships First Thunderbolt RAID

PROMISE Technology, Inc. is shipping the Pegasus line of RAID solutions featuring new Thunderbolt technology.

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PROMISE Pegasus comes in 4-bay and 6-bay configurations ranging from four to 12TB capacity and is available for order through the Apple Online Store.

Pegasus enables consumers and media professionals to store and edit video and play multiple streams of uncompressed 8 and 10-bit HD video on the new line of Thunderbolt-enabled Macs. Pegasus also improves the ability to manipulate and edit, and to do real multi-tasking, like editing multiple streams while also moving large files to the host system.

"Apple and Intel have worked together to deliver new technology that far exceeds anything previously available," said James Lee, PROMISE CEO. "PROMISE is uniquely positioned to revolutionize the industry’s storage offerings. We are enabling connectivity the world has never seen before."

"Thunderbolt sets new standards for speed, flexibility and expansion," said Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "The new Pegasus RAID with Thunderbolt delivers pro-level performance in an affordable package, perfect for use on location or in the studio."

Designed for media and entertainment customers, Pegasus offers speed and throughput in a form factor small enough for a desktop, and is available in 4-bay and 6-bay aluminum enclosures with up to 12TB of raw storage. Utilizing Thunderbolt technology I/O, Pegasus can deliver performance up to 864MB/s, more than 20 times faster than USB 2.0 and 8 times faster than FireWire 800.

Pegasus gives Final Cut Studio creative professionals the ability to edit and playback multiple streams of uncompressed 8-bit and 10-bit high-definition video on a Thunderbolt-enabled Mac. Pegasus can also provide storage space for other popular Apple applications such as Aperture, iPhoto and iMovie and is compatible with Time Machine.

Pegasus Product Highlights

Performance, Flexibility for Mac Professionals and Artists – With over 800 MB/s of performance, amateur professionals, audio engineers, photographers and video post production engineers benefit from the performance of Pegasus with Thunderbolt Technology.
Easy to Use and Easy to Manage – Pegasus comes preconfigured out of the box for fast, easy set-up to store music, photos, videos and documents or ingest and edit production video. Managing Pegasus is effortless with a new made for Mac OS X management software.
Storage for the Digital Home – With two channels of bi-directional 10 Gb/s performance, Thunderbolt enables backups to happen while editing of videos or playlists is taking place.
Quiet and Eco-Smart.
RoHS compliant

Sporting a new enclosure design, an 80Plus power supply and an active fan management, system noise is not an issue.

Pricing and Availability
Pegasus is offered as a 4-bay or 6-bay RAID enclosure supporting seven RAID modes including RAID 0, 1, 5, 6 and 10. Pegasus features two Thunderbolt Technology ports, a aluminum enclosure and a fan for reduced system noise. Pegasus hardware RAID solutions are available for order from the Apple Online Store. MSRP for a 4-bay 4TB configuration is priced at $999, with a 6-bay 12TB priced at $1,999.

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Apple Online Store also offers Pegasus units at 6TB (6x1TB HDDs) and 8TB(4x2TB) at the same price, $1,499. They are more expansive than RAID with older interfaces. For example the Promise SmartStor DS4600 4x1TB RAID with FireWire and USB costs $799 to be compared with $999 for the same capacity and 10Gb Thunderbolt dramatically faster than FW800.

LaCie is supposed to ship its Thunderbolt Little Big Disk with two 1TB 2.5-inch HDDs in few days to be followed by a complete line. Sonnet and Certon Systems are also involved in storage products with the new interface from Intel and Apple. Sonnet just revealed 8-drive RAID at up to 24TB with Thunderbolt and its Echo Express PCIe 2.0 expansion chassis with Thunderbolt ports enabling to plug in PCIe Express 2.0 adapter cards to any computer with a Thunderbolt port.

Apple recently reveals the price of a Thunderbolt cable (2.0 m): $49! But it's not a bunch of copper, according to cultofmac.com. They contain two Gennum GN2033 chips, one in each connector in addition to twelve other support chips, resistors and electrical components. "What does the Gennum chip do? It’s a transceiver that enables reliable data transfer at cutting-edge speeds over low cost, thin-gauge copper cables," wrote cultofmac.com. "Put another way: at data rates above 5Gbps, you need to have chips to adjust for cable attenuation and dispersion properties to maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio."

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Apple Thunderbolt cable
(Source: cultofmac.com)

This cable can also be used for Target Disk Mode between two Macs that support Thunderbolt, or to use a new iMac as a display for a MacBook Pro equipped with Thunderbolt.

After Apple, Sony appears to be the first to launch a Thunderbolt notebook (Vaio Z) integrating Intel 'Sandy Bridge' Core i7-2620M processor.

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